Tiny Teeth

by Sarah Hans

I risk walking to the doctor’s office from my workplace, because it’s only a few blocks, and I think the fresh air will do me some good. I don’t tell anyone I’m going alone, or that I’m walking. I know what they’ll say. Outside without an escort, without the safety of an enclosed vehicle, my heart thrums like a tap dancer’s quick steps. I should be scared or thrilled by the prospect of imminent danger, but I’m too frightened of the news waiting for me at the doctor’s office to be worried about much else. As I walk, I become more and more convinced the news reports about the gangs of feral children, with their pictures of mutilated bodies and wide-eyed reporters speaking in quavering voices, are attempts to manipulate us with fear. To keep us inside. My coworkers are fools to walk in groups, to rush from their cars to the office with Tasers and pistols clutched in their fists. There is no danger here.

But then I see the girl, and I know I’ve made a mistake. She crouches behind a bush, and when I spot her, I freeze like a rabbit. She locks eyes with me and rises out of the greenery. She’s maybe four years old, though that’s a guess. It can be hard to tell the age of a child who has been feral a long time, and I’ve never been around many children to begin with, even before the virus made them violent.

She wears a tiny pair of denim shorts and a purple t-shirt decorated with glitter hearts, both caked with gore. Her hair was once styled in pigtails, but one side droops sadly, and the other side is a crusted mass of red-brown scab in place of hair. Her face is twisted into a permanent snarl. Her front two teeth are missing, which would make the expression she wears comical if she didn’t have her hands held at the ready, fingers extended to grab, filthy fingernails ready to claw. A growl issues from low in her throat. Her eyes–bright green, shimmering like beetle wings in the sunlight–are filled with hatred and bloodlust. She smells like stale urine and blood and roadkill. (Continue Reading…)

I Hate All that is Mine

by Leigh Harlen

The beanbag crunched and whooshed as Karla dropped into it. No one older than sixteen should have to sit in a beanbag, but she didn’t complain and did her best to get comfortable. While Hailey set up her movie, she rehearsed what she would say when it was over to cover how much she hated it. The camera work was really good. I loved the way you lit the room. That one shot was really striking. No, I’m not lying, I really liked it.

“This is going to floor you, I swear. It’s the best thing I’ve ever made.” Hailey’s hands trembled almost as much as her voice as she hooked up the cables between her laptop and the flat screen television mounted on the wall of her basement bedroom. (Continue Reading…)

Waxworks

by W.L. George

Henry Badger rapidly paced the City churchyard; his air of anxiety seemed to overweigh his small, though not unpleasing, features. He was an insignificant little man, dressed in pepper-and-salt tweeds. His hair was cut very close, except where a love-lock, plastered down with jasmine-oil, trailed over his forehead from under his hard black hat. Whenever he completed the circuit of the churchyard he peered towards the gate through which must come disturbance and romance. Henry Badger was in love, and he could not escape the consequences of his share in our common delight and affliction.

Suddenly brightness overspread his sharp features. It was she! She, in a pink crêpe-de-Chine blouse, disconnected rather than connected with her white serge skirt by a patent-leather belt. Above the pink blouse was an equally pink neck, and a rather pretty face, all soft curves. She was bright blue of eye and tumbled in pleasant fairness about the hair, under a large straw hat from which drooped on one side a fragment of ivy that might with advantage have been placed elsewhere. But her name was Ivy, and she liked to live in harmony.

“I’m late,” she said, with pretty-briskness, as they shook hands. “So sorry, Henry. Only the boss got dictating, and he likes to hear himself talk, even if it is only to little me. Still, better late than never,” she added, with a smile indicating wit.

(Continue Reading…)

House Party Blues

by Suzanne Palmer

He settles into the house like a new layer of skin, this fresh shell with room to grow and thrive, for a little while. He makes the pipes in the walls sing with his own heartbeat, dresses himself in the wallpaper, clothes himself in rug and woodwork, adorns himself with knicknacks and old family photos full of forced, unconvincing smiles. A husband, a wife, arms around each other, but space evident between.

The husband: beginnings of a beard in one, clean-shaven elsewhere, eyes dark, smile thin. Nowhere does it say wife-beater, but so he is, and those memories taste of beer and blood.

The wife: always in something floral, often long-sleeved, even at the beach, at the park. Leaning towards her husband, as if to try to draw him in turn towards her. That age-old myth told to women: if you love him enough, if you are a good enough wife, he will stop hitting you. He is surprised by the fury in her now; after all she put up with, the bruises and black eyes and broken bones, she never got to see her husband redeemed, her own sacrifices cashed in at last, and she is enraged.

No children; it made taking the house easier. It is not a place stained by laughter or joy. (Continue Reading…)

Black Matter

by Vivian Shaw

… when all those legs and arms and heads… shall join together at the latter day and cry all “we died at such a place,” some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left…

—Shakespeare, Henry V

It’s easier if you use a finger. If you have a finger to use. I don’t have fingers, on this one. What I have is a case full of samples, in tubes, and I can already tell this is a complete shitshow: they’re hopelessly garbled, mixed up together in a cacophony of terror and pain that gives me the kind of headache that will last for days. I need to get out to the site.

They don’t like people poking around, of course, during an active investigation, but I’m nominally part of the National Transportation Safety Board – got the blue nylon jacket with the letters on the back and everything, like some overgrown high-school kid who lettered in nerd instead of football. I’m allowed access to the crash site, it’s written down in the rules, and if I pick up fingers that don’t belong to me it doesn’t technically fuck with the chain-of-evidence protocol. Sometimes I get lucky and find what I need right away, soaked into the cockpit: human flesh and bone pulverized at the point of impact to a pink soup which nonetheless is capable of standing up, on this latter day, and telling me a tale. Sometimes I don’t, and it takes longer.

I’m strictly last-resort. When everything else is coming up empty, when both black boxes and the quick-access recorder, if there is one, are useless; when they cannot from the radar track and transponder data work out why the plane did what it did, when there’s no obvious evidence of explosion and the pilots didn’t say anything useful to ATC and all the shreds of aluminum and rubber and plastic are keeping their secrets to themselves – when they simply do not know enough to determine probable cause – that’s when they call me, and it’s always four a.m. when that call comes through. Stacy, we got one. Pack up your crystal ball and shag ass, we need you. (Continue Reading…)